Tag: Church of England

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February 2016

February 6th 2016: 1 Corinthians 16:10-24

You can follow today’s reading by clicking on this sentence.

‘Let all you do be done in love’.

I wish my life looked like that. I wish. Sometimes I manage to do things in love. Trouble is, I get so excited at managing to have done the right thing that I’m immediately more interested in how this reflects so well on me, rather than bringing any benefit to others, or pointing people to Jesus. Perhaps you don’t recognise that in yourself as you read this, but I’d hazard a guess that it might resonate with more than a few of us.

Of course, doing things in love doesn’t mean always being nice. Nor does it mean always doing the thing that society expects or demands of us as we follow Jesus. Somehow or other, following Jesus, loving God comes first. It impacts our family lives, our work lives, our Church lives (hopefully God has something to do with our Churches!) how we relate to other people and how we relate to ourselves (often the hardest aspect of life of all). But we are friends and brothers and sisters of Jesus now, first and before all. It is his love that should have an impact on what we do and how we do it. His love that reaches to the furthest corners of the world, into its darkest places, where it seems that hope cannot exist, and explodes the myth of hopelessness by shining the light of love in. We’re called to be people of love. We serve for love, we fight for love, we suffer and rejoice for love. Is what we do, what we say designed to lift up another, or is it designed to make us feel better? Do we like to put others down? Have we decided what potential a person has, however little, and become unwilling to see the possibility of redemption? Are we happily unreconciled?

Let’s think about these things as we go about our days today, and try to make sure that all we do is done in love.

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January 2016 Lectionary Ramblings

January 2nd 2016: Colossians 2:8-23

You can read today’s text by clicking on this sentence.

‘See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ. For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have come to fullness in him, who is the head of every ruler and authority’

These verses have so much power to them it’s almost unfair.

Where does the power lie in your life, in mine? We can think we need to find ways to assert ourselves, our independence. Our society demands that we submit to leaders for the common good (a common good which not many of us have often agreed to and seems to shape-shift to fulfil the demands of political expediency), as Jesus does of course, in telling us to ‘give to Caesar what is Caesar’s’ (but what might that be?). Here though, the writer of Colossians reminds us of a key point with which to begin our year: all of God is in Jesus, and we have everything we need and were made to be in him. He is where our focus is to be. He is the source of our life, our breath, every need or lack we had is met by him and in him. It may well not feel like it, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

I’ve always found the concept of being ‘in Christ’ a challenge. I think in part it’s because everyday life feels so immediate, so pressing, that I’m so ‘in the world’, that the idea of being ‘not of it’ doesn’t get much of a chance to take root and develop.  There’s so much injustice that we’ve been asked to partner with God in seeking to fight and overcome. There’s so much of society which sorely lacks hope, that needs to hear the Good News of joy, peace, possibility and freedom in Christ. As an activist-y kind of person, I’m always wanting to get stuck in, bring about as much change as I can, make a better world, make the world I live in today more like the new world that Jesus promises us is coming in the future.

But here’s a question: when I’m working hard to bring about the world that I think is the one that God is building, when I’m going forth and making disciples, baptising them in Jesus’s name, am I letting God begin the building of that world with me, in me? Am I content to be in Christ, or am I seeking to grow something that looks like what he lived and died for, but is actually my own version of it, inadvertently leaving him out? To my understanding, if we have been brought to fulness in Christ, then we have. If we’re brought to fulness, we’re already at fulness. We’re already ‘in’ Christ. There’s not a further way for us to be ‘in’ Christ. We don’t need to work harder, become more tired, sacrifice more and more, seek new ways to suffer, or find ways to impose our doctrines and our way of life on others. Jesus has done what needs to be done to bring us life, hope and a future already. My worry and stress will not make me any more alive. More to the point they may well cause me to lose sight or focus on the simple glorious truth of just how fully I am alive.

I have the choice to live my life directed God’s way, but that does not bring me more life, more fulness. Those are God’s to give to me.

To be in Christ is the safest, most secure place to be. Let’s enjoy resting there today.

 

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January 2016 Lectionary Ramblings

January 1st 2016: Luke 2:15-21

You can read the text of today’s reading by clicking on this sentence

There’s a certain matter-of-fact-ness about this account of the visit of the Shepherds to the newborn Jesus. I find it intriguing that, having had what must have been something of a life-altering experience, they accepted the explanation of the Angels without a second thought and went to Bethlehem. Is that what we do? Is that what I do? Often when something happens in my life, whether I’ve got as far as recognising God at work in it or not, my first thought is to try and think it through, to rationalise it, make sense of it, plot a sensible course of action, based on scripture, tradition and reason and so to work out what the best thing to do next might be. It sounds sensible doesn’t it, but this isn’t what the Shepherds did. Beyond being terrified a few moments earlier, the writer of Luke doesn’t allow for a moment’s doubt. They’re told to go, and they go. And as they go, they find things just as they were told they would be. No small wonder they told everyone they could find about what they’d seen.

The story of the birth of Jesus is not rational. It does not make sense. Many people make careers out of trying to crowbar some logic in to the Incarnation. What it shows most clearly is that God requires straightforward, but not often simple, faith and trust from us. Each character in this story had to in some way or other suspend rationality in order to go where God invited. As we start 2016, are we willing to let go of our supposed wisdom, our cynicism, our higher logic, and simply commit to spending this year trusting God first? Not to say that we should suspend the use of our understanding, but that they should not become idols elevated above the one whose story we live to share and who has invited us to share in the writing of new chapters this coming year.As the song goes, ‘God is with us, round the earth the message bring’.

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Disability Uncategorized

Ministry as a Disabled Person in the Church of England: A Vision Haydon Spenceley

Ministry as a Disabled Person in the Church of England: A Vision

 

Haydon Spenceley

 

20As it is, there are many members, yet one body. 21The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you’, nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you.’ 22On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, 23and those members of the body that we think less honourable we clothe with greater honour, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; 24whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honour to the inferior member

 

1 Corinthians 12:20-24 (NRSV)

 

You shall not revile the deaf or put a stumbling-block before the blind; you shall fear your God: I am the Lord.

 

Leviticus 19:14 (NRSV)

 

In the church of the modern day, perhaps more so than any previous stage in Christian history, diversity is a key driver. By the grace of God, people of all backgrounds, experiences, outlooks, strengths and weaknesses are continuing to be drawn into communities of faith, relationships of discipleship and intimacy and drawn along into the glorious, mysterious journey of life, faith and hope that is our response to the wonderful Good News of Jesus Christ. The church has always been for all, just as Christ died once and for all, but as the Church of England seeks to maintain and develop its calling to be a Christian presence in every community, the challenge remains for us as an institution, as the church, to reflect the wondrous beauty and diversity of God’s creation and the redemptive, reconciling work of Christ in how we are led and how we lead.

 

As a disabled person, I find passages such as those quoted above to be both exciting and daunting. Whether I see myself as one of those parts of the body which is weaker or not (and I think this is something which is difficult for each individual person to rightly perceive about themselves), it is more than true that my journey towards and through training for ordination in the Church of England has not been an easy one. Indeed it should not be easy, not many of the most worthwhile things in life are. However, as I have been humbled, formed, taught and most importantly blessed, by both the opportunity of being at theological college and being granted the privilege of time to stop and specifically focus on growing in my relationship with God and my love for his church, I have spent much time thinking about how disability can play a part in ministry. Not merely is disability something to be dealt with or worked around, as part of ministry. Rather I would argue it is something to be celebrated, as Paul seems to intimate in a passage from Corinthians 12 above. Disabled people are part of the church. They should be. They must be, in order for the church to be healthy, to truly reflect the will of God for his bride and most of all, to be holy. A church which puts a stumbling block before a disabled person, which does not allow them to fully integrate, participate and, where appropriate, lead, is not a holy Church. It is not the church that Christ envisaged, that he called us to be.

 

It is my contention that the church has an opportunity perhaps greater than at any previous time in its history to be a force for social change in this generation, in this time. As social care and welfare continue to be under review and discussion, I believe it is time for the church to take centre stage as the one actor in society through which people, whatever their levels of  functionality or impairment, are treated with equal levels of love, respect as creations loved by God, made to look like him, known to him by name and delightful to him. It was never God’s intention for social disability to enter the world. I believe passionately that one of the key potential roles of the Church, hopefully spearheaded by the Church of England in the coming years, could be the attempt to eradiate social disablement, through loving acts of kindness, service, education, and through the grace and power of the Spirit.  This is something which I think God is calling me to, calling us to, as people who work in this area in His Church. It may seem an impossible task, but nothing is impossible for our God. The day when our Churches, our communities, do not put a stumbling-block before those whose functionality is not at a level that the outside world would deem “full”, when someone might be able to lead the Church, regardless of their physical or emotional strengths and weaknesses if it is deemed right for them to do so, is closer than it has ever been before. Let’s work hard to give everyone in our Churches an equal opportunity to join in and play the game!

 

Haydon Spenceley

 

This article was originally published in The Church Times, July 5th 2012